This challenge is part of the engineering hiring process at Beside.
Interface is operating with a small team of dedicated & talented people. We are looking for seasoned engineers with a deep technical knowledge, strong understanding of their technical stack, and excellent product intuitions to join our team.
This exercise has been designed to give a glimpse of what it is like to build a messaging app, and the kind of technical challenges we face and care about.
We expect you to spend 4-6 hours on this challenge, simulating real-world, time-boxed work.
You are tasked with the implementation of a messaging app that allows the user to communicate (send and receive text messages) with bots, each in their own 1:1 chat.
A companion server is available for you to use. You can read more about it in
./server. Its documentation contains information on how it can be
run, and what kinds of API endpoints & entities are available.
You can choose a target platform of your choice for this challenge: one of iOS, macOS, Android, or web.
Functional requirements:
- The app should start on a screen showing the list of all chats
- The app should allow opening each chat individually
- The app should allow sending messages to a chat
- The app should reflect the messages sent to and received from the server
- The app should be resilient to bad network conditions (drops & timeouts)
Some topics that we find interesting to dig:
- Make the app work offline using a persistence layer of your choice
- Make the app idempotent in regards to what you send and receive
- Integrate a splashscreen to hide chats while the app is loading
- Add support for optimistic sending to give instantaneity in the UI
- Add support for a local read/unread indicator
- Avoid to block changing states so the app feels fluid & snappy
- Anything that you feel could improve the UX!
We have prepared a design to help you during this challenge. You will also receive the Figma link along with the challenge instructions.
We know you only have a limited time alloted to deliver this challenge, and thus will have to prioritize what you work on. A few things that are important for us and that will be considered during the review:
- documentation: is the readme clear? are important parts of the code documented?
- impact: what did you consciouslly decided to prioritize?
- maintainability: is the code well-structured and easy to read/evolve?
- robustness: is the code tested or easily testable? are edge-cases considered? is static analysis leveraged?
Good luck, and enjoy!